Small Soldiers

Summary: This game is a top down pixel art strategy game that sees you and your fellow AI buddy as commanders of an army. In order to survive and grow your new prestigious careers as commanders, you and your AI companion need to create your own armies and go to war against the other two evil AI commanders that wish to crush your new found leadership before it even starts!

Build your armies and lead them to war, and destroy the enemies headquarters before they destroy yours! 

Stages of this game's development

Brainstorming - The brainstorming part of this game development was actually not to terrible as I had already had a preconceived notion of what I wanted to do for this project. 

Growing up I had always really enjoyed top-down real-time strategy games, so it was pretty natural to come up with the inspiration for wanting to do something similar for my next game project within Construct 3.

With the "what" out of the way came the "how" and how indeed was exactly what I was asking myself as I had never truly made something like that within Construct 3 before, so I knew it might be challenging.

But after I thought about it for awhile some ideas and ways of programming the game to act how I wanted it to slowly started to form in my mind and once that started to happen I just started working.

Development - Once I started the development of this game, most of the pieces and the basics of how to get started where parts that I already knew so I just recalled what I had done before on past projects and put that into work here and began by making a rough prototype of my project first, before I got far ahead of myself.

This crucial step was something that I would often overlook before and I would try to aim for exactly the vision I had for the game is right from the start and often I found that this method is inefficient and stressful as you spend more time trying to make things look exactly how you want it to with very little to work with and if you can't make it work how you want it then you often get discouraged and quit before you even get started.

To rectify this, I changed my perspective on things and how I go about game development, and decided that I should first create the backbone of my game first or the prototype and get roughly all of the mechanics and rules that I want in the game first, so that without any art assets play testers and other people could at least get an idea of what my game was about.

Finally, once the prototype was done and all of the "groundwork" is completed, then I would start adding art assets and polishing my game to finally start resembling the game that I had originally dreamed of. Hopefully other developers do something like this as well, and if not then maybe this method could help you!

Testing - Testing of this game was actually rather frustrating and time consuming unfortunately, and was most definitely the longest part of this game's development cycle. I feel like depending on a developer's game this particular step can be rather easy or potentially rather tedious depending on how in-depth your game is and what's the scope of the entire project.

But, for my project since it was a strategy game and that is particularly a genre that I have a lot of experience in playing I was definitely biased in making sure the game was perfect and that certainly didn't help this process. (:

But all in all, this particular cycle took a rather long time since this is a strategy game and it is important that games like these are as fair as possible to insure that all players feel that the game is fair and that they all have an equal chance at winning.

But on top of this, my game also uses quite a lot of AI and that was really the bane of my existence and honestly this is what contributed to most of the time that was spent working on testing this game. Due to the amount of AI I was using and because Construct 3 is still a rather simple engine and with simple AI, this task took extra long to make the AI act and think the way that I wanted them to.

Polish - Last but not least, the polishing stage,  for most people this is the most fun stage as most developers are almost done with their game and now all they have to do is clean it up, fix bugs, adjust balancing issues, and add little details that make the whole game pop and stand out from other similar games.

And I while I did partake in this process, due to the time constraints I was under at the  time, this cycle was unfortunately rather short for me and I do wish that I could have spent some more time working within this cycle.

But, its not all doom and gloom as I do think that I was able to fix some things and in general make all around improvements to the game while I was polishing this game. I will say as a side note and a lesson for me to learn, is the importance of making sure to set aside time for this cycle in your game's development cycle. 

What really makes or breaks a game or makes it stand out from the crowd is the amount of polish and uniqueness that the game has and most of that all happens within the polishing cycle, so its important to save time for it!